


remus john fucking lupin, in memoriam

by faedemon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Battle of Hogwarts, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), but its more a study of lupin himself, this drabble is framed in addressing a miscellaneous classmate of lupins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22514152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: The fact of the matter is that Remus John Lupin is a werewolf, and you wanted to be him long before you knew that. You read his on the list of names in the Prophet, after the end of the third Wizarding War, the second one of You-Know-Who’s. You sat in your home, untouched, unharmed, except for the way your heart was set to racing.A character study of sorts.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	remus john fucking lupin, in memoriam

Is you as you always wished you could be. A child and a monster at the same time, someone who could both need protecting and need holding back. You always wanted that power: to make people afraid. To keep them at bay, barking like a dog on a leash, your friends the leash and Hogwarts the stake they’re attached to. He never wanted the wolf, you know. You love to romanticize the bad parts.

The fact of the matter is that Remus John Lupin was a werewolf. And he was a Prefect, top of his class in damn near everything, a Marauder, a Professor. He was, impossibly, the good boy. He was also far scarier than James or even Sirius could be, sometimes. You wanted to be him, maybe.

You didn’t know he was a werewolf, of course. No one did. Probably a few people put together the puzzle: absences like clockwork every month, scars littering his arms and face and other places you can’t see, a roughness to him, a wildness. He was well-known enough for someone to go digging, after all. A Marauder. A Prefect. A war hero, eventually, though people will know his affliction by then. But even in Hogwarts you saw him.

No, you didn’t want to _be_ him, that twitchy kid come just-this-side-of-lenient Prefect. You wanted to hold yourself the way he did, by seventh year. You wanted the way he came into himself. He was scared, once, of his own shadow, but by the time the war came to meet him he was radiant. He was you as you always wished you could end up: new. Character development in spades, character arc complete. He was battered, bruised, broken boy and he was werewolf and he was hero, and you were one of the miscellaneous.

Yes, you are the one reading the storybook, and his name is on every page. Remus John Lupin, werewolf, Marauder, battered and bleeding and the almost-survivor. He went last, and you weren’t there. Who would be? Who other than the people inside that castle, the ones whose options were to fight or die? Who on the outside would have come running? (Even though, somehow, you wish you did—)

You read his on the list of names in the Prophet, after the end of the third Wizarding War, the second one of You-Know-Who’s. It was not alphabetized. His was there, printed in unshifting black ink, right above Nymphadora Tonks and right below Fred Weasley. And you sat in your home, untouched, unharmed, except for the way your heart was set to racing. Maybe you’re a pureblood, and had no reason (so you thought) to fear. Maybe you’re just good at hiding. Maybe you fled Europe entirely (Voldemort’s reign never left Britain, really, so why not run?).

Either way you are alive. Either way, he is dead, and you were never him the way you wanted to be.

Each Marauder went, in the end. James Potter, personally murdered by Voldemort. Peter Pettigrew, choked to death on a phantom limb of Voldemort’s making. Sirius Black, dead at the end of Bellatrix Lestrange’s wand. And Remus John fucking Lupin: died without anyone looking, killed by some miscellaneous Death Eater, only noticed and cried for when everyone had been laid out in the Great Hall. Longest surviving Marauder and most pointless, cruel death.

He deserved, you think, to go down facing Voldemort himself.

He deserved, you think, to live.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! if you liked it, leave a comment :)


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